KM: Piss off, I’m not in a good mood. This is a rant and I don’t want or need your input.

God: Oh… Okay, bye…

KM: Rhetorical question –

When was the Catholic Church NOT a haven for pedophiles?

The story that follows is fiction. It doesn’t invoke works of ancient hearsay, so heresy cannot be claimed. Neither can blasphemy, because blasphemy’s not relevant unless something that can’t withstand rational scrutiny claims to be true.

One day, more than a thousand years ago, a parish priest made an unscheduled visit to the largest landowner in the district. On arrival he heard unusual noises coming from the basement. The priest descended the steps and found the landowner engaged in buggery with a ten-year-old boy. Also present, in varying states of undress and arousal, were three of the landowner’s friends. The priest gasped and turned to leave. One of the men grabbed him and dragged him back inside. The peasant boy was sent on his way with a warning to keep their secret, on pain of death for his whole family. The priest was tied to a post.

The landowner and friends had been caught in an act of such vile debauchery that their execution would surely follow. A plan was hatched. The priest was killed and buried right there in the basement. One of the landowner’s friends was a visitor from another province and therefore unknown to any of the locals. On the following Sunday he appeared in the pulpit and announced that he was the new pastor of the parish and that the previous priest had been reassigned to another parish far away.

After one particularly depraved session with a young alter boy, which included a few flagons of consecrated wine, the conspirators realised that not only was the church providing a good cover for their activities, it was also facilitating them. Perhaps it could provide a whole lot more besides. Soon the rapidly expanding group had killed and replaced priests in eight neighbouring parishes, and eventually took over the cathedral in the provincial capital.

Sensing that they couldn’t continue to expand through violent acquisition, the newly installed bishop and his cronies declared a split from the established church and set themselves up as a committee of cardinals to forge some new rules. Promises of a better heaven and a more terrible hell helped to swell attendances but it was the forgiving of sins through confession that really appealed to the masses. This was a masterstroke as it gave the priests the power of knowing the secrets of the flock along with an ability to extract extra donations from serious sinners to ensure their secrets remained buried. They also implemented a celibacy rule, so they’d have no further need to maintain a public pretence of being socially acceptable, “normal” heterosexuals.

This new version of the old religion was a runaway success. With income from donations, confessions and indulgences, the church started charities, orphanages and schools. Initially this was a way of keeping stocks of juvenile sex slaves readily available, but also, through clever brainwashing, it increased the numbers of new followers.

In the early days of the church, there was no way for any of the victims of this pedophile empire to know what they a were part of. Each individual victim, sworn to secrecy by their priest, could only believe that were indeed a very unlucky individual. The church continued to grow and spread its system of institutionalised child rape to the point where the victims numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, world-wide.

In the second half of the twentieth century, developments in communication meant that victims began to hear stories of other victims and when they realised they weren’t alone, many began to come forward. The church attributed the complaints to a few bad apples and worked hard to protect its status and, more importantly, the true history of its establishment.

And there ends the fiction. But think about this –

Had such an organisation been established a thousand years ago, and grown and become massively successful, would there be any obvious difference between it and the Catholic Church of today?

When was the Catholic Church NOT a Haven for Pedophiles?

( Post Script – The Vatican has always known that thousands of priests were, and are, serial child rapists. Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope following 20 years as the chief enforcer of the Crimen Sollicitationis, the secret, 39 page, Vatican instruction manual for maintaining secrecy of sex offences in the church. It advises on appropriate punishment of victims for disclosing what happened to them, but says absolutely nothing about helping them. [Sex Crimes and the Vatican, BBC, 2006] The Church claims it’s doing all it can to address the problem, although its actions indicate that self-preservation has always been the paramount concern.)

KM: Oi, God!

God: Yes, Neel?

KM: What do you think about that?

God: You told me to go away.

KM: Yeah, but you never listen. At least you never answer prayers.

God: Just because I don’t answer prayers doesn’t mean I’m not listening.

KM: It was a question not a prayer. You going to answer?

God: It’s a more plausible story than most of the shit the Pope comes out with.

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About Neel Ingman

Neel Ingman is a writer and blogger who vividly remembers the fear of being a young boy who was taught to believe that God could read everybody’s mind. He also remembers the terror of having swearwords arrive unbidden into his consciousness whilst sitting in church. Along with merely thinking of the forbidden words came the urge to shout them out. A temptation he struggled successfully to resist. At least in church. It was a temptation similar to the feeling some people get atop a tall building or cliff. Neel has also managed to resist this temptation. So far.